


Superheroes

by paperchimes



Category: Life Is Strange (Video Game)
Genre: F/F, pricefield
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-26
Updated: 2015-07-26
Packaged: 2018-04-11 08:28:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 748
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4428398
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperchimes/pseuds/paperchimes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If Gods could exist, she would be the worst of them all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Superheroes

She closed her eyes to the thrum only she could hear and embraced the world as it stood in absolute stillness. Birds caught in mid-flight and breaths held in lungs, unmoving, unyielding. As how Chloe was. As how she could never be. Max was made to see it all: every single timeline that could and would have been. She had held Chloe’s hand and ran by her side. She had pushed Chloe away from a multitude of oncoming trains. She had watched her friend impaled onto unseen scaffolding, knives and glass, and once more in reverse. Max was forced to watch Chloe fall again.

And again.

Until it could no longer hurt.

The marrow in her right arm burned like it was made of molten steel. Broken capillaries danced on the surface of her skin. Max felt her insides breaking and remaking for the thousandth time. The scent of candlewicks and iron was perpetual in the air.

How long had the people around her been holding their breaths? 

Max looked to Chloe, standing by her side. Unknowing Chloe, Unyielding Chloe. Chloe with blonde and blue hair with a limp in her stride. A new Chloe, all over again. 

She was not sure how far back had she rewound this time. Sometimes, she wished she could reset everything to the beginning of Time, but she knew Chloe would kill her for being so dramatic. And anyway, omnipotence was never something she was eager to possess. If Gods could exist, she would be the worst of them all.

Max reached out a hand to thumb away at a lock of Chloe’s haphazardly coloured hair. In frozen time, it was stiff to the touch. “Time sucks,” she rasped into the abyss. “Whenever I let it move, you end up getting hurt.” The words came as easily as they did the first time, and as always, her confession fell onto unhearing ears. It almost made her sad. “Sometimes I wish you could be here with me. Sometimes I wish you could see all the shit I saw.”

But sometimes this wasn’t true. She didn’t want Chloe seeing all the bad choices she made. All those terrible timelines. The worst were the ones when they both ended up dead. 

No, correction: the worst were the ones when she was looking down the barrel of a gun and Chloe was the one to pull the trigger.

The whiteness at the edge of her vision was starting to eat away at the scene. Max watched the earth’s vibrations separate the Chloe before her into two, three, dozens of possible Chloes. All around her, everyone was morphing into amalgams of people they could be and those they could never be. Frankenstein trees shot into the air and ate the light of sun. The air erupted into crunching bone and birdsong. Unfazed, she allowed it all to unwind as she coiled the thread of Time a few times over her little finger. The silence screamed in resistance but her practiced grip was tight. She knew she was being selfish, but she didn’t want this Limbo to end just yet.

She had to hurry. There was only so much longer she could hold the world still.

“Chloe, please be kind this time,” Max sighed, closing the distance between them. In her embrace, she was disappointed to feel no heartbeat. “I keep saving you but no one is saving me.” The metal on her jacket bit into her arms as the world threatened to split again.

Wiping away the tears from her eyes, she then brushed her lips onto Chloe’s. Resolute, she allowed the kiss to continue for as long as Reality would keep still. She poured all her pain and hope into Chloe, as if she was the first and last thing she would think of in life. 

And she was.

What had hurt most for Max were not the timelines where she couldn’t be saved, but the reality that there existed no timeline with both of them alive. 

It was this reason that she would rather stop Time than remake it.

And no matter how much it hurt, she would do it again and again.

“You’re wrong about superheroes, Chloe.” 

When Max felt the grass crumbling beneath her feet, she was forced to pull away. Reluctantly, she took three calculated spaces back, melting into where her previous self had stood.

“We don’t always get the girl.”

And with a wave of her hand, the flow was restored.


End file.
